About Stegodyphus mimosarum

Stegodyphus mimosarum is commonly known as the African social velvet spider. Social spiders live in large, communal webs, in which they feed communally and cooperate in prey capture, web maintenance and brood care. Social spiders are highly inbred due to within-colony breeding and a lack of a pre-mating dispersal stage, they are therefore a perfect system to study inbreeding effects in wild animal populations.

(Text from Spiderlab, Aarhus University.)

Picture copyright: Virginia Settepani

Taxonomy ID 407821

Data source Spiderlab, Aarhus University

More information and statistics